Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective

11. Art, Truth, and Morality: Aesthetic Self-forgetfulness versus Recognition

205 Art, Truth, and Morality Aesthetic Selfforgetfulness versus Recognition Art, Beauty, and Human Life In today’s culture, which has relativized truth and morality and which has declared both the end of art and the end of metaphysics , we might be tempted to ask the reason for this essay. I do not, however, wish to engage in speculation about what Gianni Vattimo once called the “death of art.”1 I would rather recall what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said on the occasion of his Nobel lecture in 1970. According to Solzhenitsyn, despite the predictions of the disintegration and the death of art, long after our mortal lives have ended, art will remain and it will continue to have a profound impact on human beings.2 The beauty of works of art (as well as other types of beauty) does have a special power which seems to engage the human person more than truth propositions and moral rules do. It is this power or fascination of the beautiful which may have led Dostoevsky to write that beauty would save the world. Dostochapter 11 1. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. John R. Snyder (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 51–64. 2. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture (1970), trans. F. D. Reeve, available online at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine. 206  Beauty, Order, and Teleology 206  Goodness and Beauty evsky’s words are perhaps now truer than ever, for it is the case that while many have given up on truth and goodness, they remain fascinated by the beautiful. In reflecting on what he calls “the ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,” Solzhenitsyn seems to think that in our time beauty may be called upon to soar to the place once occupied by truth and goodness and thereby “complete the work of all three.”3 This is not to say that we should abandon the pursuit of truth and goodness, but rather that beauty may be a privileged route to both the true and the good, and thus that art could be of singular importance in helping the modern world.4 The salutary power of beauty and the arts has been acknowledged throughout the centuries. Perhaps no one has spoken more poignantly than Augustine of the significance of beauty in human life; for him it is beauty alone that we love.5 This assertion is no doubt indebted to Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition from which Augustine developed his philosophy of art and of beauty, a tradition different from the Aristotelian and yet, I believe, complementary. I would like in the introduction of this essay to briefly consider Plato’s account of the origin of man and how this mythological account may relate to the aesthetic experience. In the Symposium Aristophanes tells us that initially humans were rounded doubles—double men, double women, or men-women—but because of pride and the desire to be gods, we were cut in two and now we are seeking our proper or other half.6 Our deepest desire, then, is for completion and unification; our desire, or eros, is for what is beautiful , fitting, or just right. Each of us is, according to the Platonic 3. Ibid., p. 2. 4. Ibid. 5. St. Augustine, De musica 6, 13, 38, quoted in The “Via Pulchritudinis,” postplenary document of the Pontifical Council for Culture, in Culture et Fede 14, no. 2 (2006): 122. 6. The Christian account of man as image whose original is the Word, the splendor of the Father, and who acquires perfection by imitating and uniting himself to the Word, completes the inadequacies of the Platonic account. Art, Truth, and Morality  207 account, a morally divided self whose unification will only come about through love.7 The spiritual longing that human beings have for unification is described in modern times by C. S. Lewis in terms of the aesthetic experience, an experience whereby we have the illusion of belonging to the world of beauty and are aware of a heightened or optimal sense of self, perhaps precisely of a unified self. When this experience comes to an end, just as we leave the concert hall or the art museum, we find ourselves on “the journey homeward to habitual self.”8 As Lewis puts it, Beauty has turned her face in our direction but has taken no notice of us; we have not been acknowledged nor accepted. We long for that...